diff --git a/CONTEXT.md b/CONTEXT.md
index 33a8a9f..a82232c 100644
--- a/CONTEXT.md
+++ b/CONTEXT.md
@@ -32,10 +32,11 @@ pre-sets it on a page's top and bottom slice when they contain no system.
 _Avoid_: delete, skip, exclude
 
 **Slice image**:
-The rendered artifact of a slice. From a raster source: lossless WebP, RGB pure
-black, `alpha = 255 − luminance`, width capped at 1920px — paper is transparency,
-ink is alpha. From a vector source: SVG with text converted to paths. Both are
-display-ready as produced; nothing downstream reprocesses them.
+The rendered artifact of a slice: lossless WebP, RGB pure black,
+`alpha = 255 − luminance`, width capped at 1920px — paper is transparency, ink is
+alpha. Display-ready as produced; nothing downstream reprocesses it. An SVG form
+for vector sources is designed but deferred, which is why the geometry model is
+renderer-agnostic.
 _Avoid_: PNG, page image, tile
 
 **Marker**:
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 2c4cf55..ab9936b 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -44,6 +44,18 @@ needs a system package.
 | | |
 |---|---|
 | [CONTEXT.md](CONTEXT.md) | Glossary. What a slice, cut, discard, bundle and song scale actually mean here. Start here. |
-| [slicer-handoff.md](slicer-handoff.md) | The design: pipeline, geometry model, detection, bundle format, and what noteman has to change. |
-| [docs/adr/0001](docs/adr/0001-slicer-owns-image-processing-bundle-is-the-only-channel.md) | Why the slicer owns all image processing and the bundle is the only channel. |
-| [BACKLOG.md](BACKLOG.md) | Deliberately deferred, with the reasoning that got it deferred. |
+| [docs/spec.md](docs/spec.md) | The specification: pipeline, geometry model, detection, editor, bundle format, and what noteman has to change. |
+
+Deferred work is tracked as issues and milestones on the Gitea repo, not in this
+tree.
+
+Decisions that were expensive to reach, each with the evidence behind it:
+
+| | |
+|---|---|
+| [ADR 0001](docs/adr/0001-slicer-owns-image-processing-bundle-is-the-only-channel.md) | The slicer owns all image processing; the bundle is the only channel to noteman. |
+| [ADR 0002](docs/adr/0002-raster-only-svg-renderer-deferred.md) | Raster only in release 1 — measured SVG slice sizes and what they showed. |
+| [ADR 0003](docs/adr/0003-lossless-webp-with-levels-and-alpha-quantisation.md) | Lossless WebP beats every lossy option and every alternative format here. |
+| [ADR 0004](docs/adr/0004-detection-proposes-the-human-disposes.md) | No unattended mode: detection suggests, a human confirms. |
+| [ADR 0005](docs/adr/0005-pymupdf-for-all-pdf-access.md) | PyMuPDF for all PDF access, accepting AGPL. |
+| [ADR 0006](docs/adr/0006-systems-are-found-by-brackets-not-row-gaps.md) | Systems are found by vertical brackets; row-darkness gaps get it wrong. |
diff --git a/docs/adr/0002-raster-only-svg-renderer-deferred.md b/docs/adr/0002-raster-only-svg-renderer-deferred.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1400311
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/adr/0002-raster-only-svg-renderer-deferred.md
@@ -0,0 +1,61 @@
+# Raster only in release 1; the SVG renderer is deferred
+
+Vector PDFs are most of the newer corpus, and keeping them vector all the way to
+the viewer was an early goal — sheet music is line art, and SVG stays crisp at any
+tablet zoom. We measured it before building it, and decided to **rasterize vector
+sources like everything else in release 1** and revisit the SVG renderer once
+real songs have been cut.
+
+## The measurement
+
+One real vector song, 6 pages, 65 systems, rendered both ways:
+
+| Approach | Total | vs WebP |
+|---|---|---|
+| WebP slices (600 DPI → 1920, ink→alpha, lossless) | 1.19 MB | 1× |
+| SVG, naive `viewBox` + `clipPath` | 26.0 MB | 40× |
+| SVG, `set_cropbox` per band | 26.5 MB | 41× |
+| SVG, bounding-box cull + glyph subset | 3.09 MB | 2.6× |
+
+- **The naive cut is unusable.** A `viewBox` + `clipPath` slice contains the
+  entire page's geometry and merely hides eleven-twelfths of it.
+- **`set_cropbox` does not help.** MuPDF renders full page content regardless of
+  the crop, so there is no free version of the cull.
+- **The cull works.** PyMuPDF emits a `<defs>` glyph table (111 KB of a 256 KB
+  page) referenced by `<use transform="matrix(...)">`, plus body `<path>`
+  elements. Filter both by y-extent, then keep only the glyphs the survivors
+  reference. Roughly 50 lines, 15× improvement.
+
+## Why defer, given the cull works
+
+**Not size.** At 3.1 MB vs 1.2 MB per song — 225 MB vs 87 MB across a 73-song
+corpus — both are nothing on a homelab. The measurement killed the lazy
+implementation, not the idea.
+
+What defers it is risk and missing evidence:
+
+- The cull is **heuristic parsing**: glyph extents bounded at baseline ±14pt,
+  path extents read from raw `d` coordinates. It is over-inclusive by design, so
+  it fails safe — but "fails safe" still means a slice quietly carrying a
+  neighbour's slur, or a hairline dropped because the y-window was wrong on some
+  publisher's output. That needs eyeballing per song, a QA loop the raster path
+  doesn't have.
+- Rendering 65 complex SVGs in a scrolling column may be slower than 65 WebPs.
+  Unmeasured.
+- **The deciding question is unanswerable from here**: does 1920px WebP actually
+  feel insufficient when pinch-zooming on a tablet? Cutting real songs answers
+  it; more measurement doesn't.
+
+Vector PDFs are also the *clean* case for the raster path — deskew is a no-op,
+detection works best, there are no scan artefacts — so rasterizing them is not a
+degraded fallback.
+
+## Consequences
+
+- The geometry model stays **renderer-agnostic**, in normalised page coordinates,
+  so adding the SVG renderer later is an output stage rather than a redesign.
+- **Re-export from the project file** regenerates every song's bundle without
+  repeating human work, so songs cut before the SVG renderer exists are not
+  stranded.
+- noteman needs no SVG support (`image/svg+xml`, `.svg` content type, CSP header
+  on SVG responses) until the renderer ships.
diff --git a/docs/adr/0003-lossless-webp-with-levels-and-alpha-quantisation.md b/docs/adr/0003-lossless-webp-with-levels-and-alpha-quantisation.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fca73e9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/adr/0003-lossless-webp-with-levels-and-alpha-quantisation.md
@@ -0,0 +1,58 @@
+# Lossless WebP, with levels and alpha quantised to 16 levels
+
+Slice images are encoded as **lossless WebP**, with the levels adjustment applied
+and the alpha channel quantised to 16 levels. About 7 KB per slice, ~450 KB for a
+65-system song. Every lossy option and every alternative format measured
+*larger* for this content, which is the opposite of the usual intuition — hence
+this record.
+
+## The measurement
+
+20 slices of one real song, levels applied throughout, relative to plain lossless
+WebP:
+
+| | vs baseline | |
+|---|---|---|
+| **WebP lossless + alpha quantised to 16** | **68%** | chosen |
+| AVIF q60 | 90% | lossy, for 10% |
+| WebP lossless | 100% | baseline |
+| WebP lossy q85 (alpha) | 107% | |
+| AVIF q85 | 114% | |
+| JXL lossless | 130–133% | |
+| WebP lossy q85 (opaque ink-on-white) | 158% | |
+| PNG grayscale + alpha | 165% | |
+| AVIF lossless | 188% | |
+
+Separately, before levels: applying levels alone takes 338 KB → 211 KB, a 38%
+reduction.
+
+## Four results that contradict an instinct
+
+- **Lossy is bigger than lossless here.** Not a quality problem — the measured
+  difference between q85 and lossless is max 12/255, mean 0.33, i.e. invisible.
+  Lossy VP8 simply spends more bits on sharp black/white edges than VP8L's
+  palette and predictor transforms do, and notation is nothing but sharp edges.
+  The "q85 looks fine" intuition comes from photographs and inverts here.
+- **AVIF and JXL both lose**, AVIF lossless by nearly 2×. Their lossless modes
+  are afterthoughts on photo codecs. WebP's VP8L is close to purpose-built for
+  flat two-tone line art — sheet music is the content type it is best at. JXL
+  additionally has no path forward in Chrome.
+- **Alpha costs nothing.** Opaque ink-on-white and black-plus-alpha are within
+  0.1% at lossless, so paper-tint removal and future non-rectangular slices are
+  free.
+- **Levels is the single biggest lever** — 38%, as a side effect of a control
+  that exists for quality reasons anyway. Pushing the white point below the
+  paper's luminance sets vast regions to exactly `alpha = 0`, which costs almost
+  nothing to encode.
+
+Alpha quantisation to 16 levels is imperceptible: antialiased edges span 2–3 px
+at 1920, and 16 steps across that is below notice. 8 levels starts to gamble on
+thin strokes.
+
+## Rejected as not worth it
+
+- **Encoder effort tuning** — Pillow's `method=6` buys 3% and a dependency.
+- **`alpha_quality=60`** — 24%, for less control than quantisation gives.
+- **Grayscale WebP** — no such mode exists. It wouldn't help anyway: the RGB
+  channels are constant black and compress to nearly nothing, so alpha is the
+  entire payload.
diff --git a/docs/adr/0004-detection-proposes-the-human-disposes.md b/docs/adr/0004-detection-proposes-the-human-disposes.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b2e0852
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/adr/0004-detection-proposes-the-human-disposes.md
@@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
+# Detection proposes, the human disposes — there is no unattended mode
+
+Every automatic result the slicer produces — skew angle, cut positions, source
+type, staff height, ink bounds — is a **suggestion the user confirms or modifies**
+before it is committed. There is no batch mode, no headless "slice this folder",
+and no code path that writes a bundle without a human having looked at it.
+
+This is a constraint on the tool's shape, not a UI preference, which is why it
+gets an ADR: it deletes an entire phase of the original plan and it will look
+like a missing feature to anyone who finds the detection code and wonders why it
+isn't wired to a CLI.
+
+## Why
+
+The corpus is PDFs from a choir's distribution channel, and quality varies
+wildly — clean vector engravings at one end, noisy scans with a previous owner's
+pencil markings at the other. **Testing showed the detection algorithms produce
+unusable slices on any source with speckles or otherwise poor quality.** Not
+slightly-off slices: unusable ones.
+
+But the same testing showed the suggestions land *close* on decent sources —
+close enough that correcting them is faster than placing cuts from scratch. So
+detection earns its place as an accelerator, and loses any claim to being
+load-bearing.
+
+## What this rejected
+
+The original plan's **Phase A** was a deliberately non-interactive CLI:
+rasterize, auto-deskew, auto-detect boundaries, write numbered slices, and fix
+the misses by hand in GIMP. Its justification was "learn the failure modes before
+designing the editor," which is a good idea.
+
+It doesn't survive the premise. A CLI whose output can't be trusted has GIMP as
+its repair path — routing work back into the manual process the project exists to
+remove. A diagnostic variant (dump per-page PNGs with proposed cuts drawn in red)
+was considered and also dropped: it only re-shows a failure already confirmed by
+testing, and the editor shows the same thing live.
+
+Release 1 is therefore the editor and detection together. There is no smaller
+first release that is actually usable.
+
+## Consequences
+
+- **Manual placement is the primary interaction**, not a correction affordance.
+  The editor must be fully usable with detection producing nothing.
+- **Despeckling targets the detector, not the output.** The known failure mode is
+  specks, so a median blur and a small-component filter clean the row-darkness
+  profile the detector reads; the shipped pixels come from the levels-adjusted
+  image.
+- Cut placement is deliberately **forgiving** — anywhere in the whitespace gap
+  yields the same output, since trim crops to ink afterwards. Precision is not
+  asked of the human.
+- The editor should surface **slice edges**, not just cut lines, so trim
+  anomalies (a speck anchoring the bounding box) are visible rather than
+  discovered later in the viewer.
diff --git a/docs/adr/0005-pymupdf-for-all-pdf-access.md b/docs/adr/0005-pymupdf-for-all-pdf-access.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..261551b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/adr/0005-pymupdf-for-all-pdf-access.md
@@ -0,0 +1,36 @@
+# PyMuPDF for all PDF access, accepting AGPL
+
+All PDF work — rasterizing at a chosen DPI, exporting SVG, and inspecting page
+content to classify a source as bitmap or vector — goes through **PyMuPDF**. It
+is a single wheel with MuPDF bundled, so the tool needs no system packages. Its
+licence is **AGPL-3.0**, which we accept.
+
+## Why not the permissive combination
+
+The obvious permissive stack was `pypdfium2` (Apache/BSD) for rasterizing plus
+`mutool` or `pdftocairo` shelled out for SVG. Both of those are **system
+packages** — `mupdf-tools`, `poppler` — and a system package on the vector path
+is precisely the failure the language choice was made to avoid: the tool is
+supposed to install once and run from any directory on any machine.
+
+The SVG step can't simply be skipped, either. Music glyphs come from a notation
+font (Emmentaler, Bravura, or Sibelius/Finale's). An SVG that *references* a font
+renders as garbage on a device that lacks it, so text must be converted to paths
+at export. PyMuPDF does this **by default** — `page.get_svg_image(text_as_path=1)`,
+verified to emit `<path>` elements and zero `<text>` — so the font risk is closed
+with no extra tooling.
+
+Mixing the two (pypdfium2 for raster, PyMuPDF only for SVG) is the worst option:
+two libraries with overlapping responsibilities, and AGPL linked in anyway.
+
+## Consequences
+
+- **The AGPL propagates only if the slicer is published.** For a local personal
+  tool it costs nothing. A future permissive release would need the rasterizer
+  swapped back to `pypdfium2` — a contained change, since PDF access sits behind
+  the renderer-agnostic geometry model.
+- **Source-type detection comes free** from the same library: `get_images()` plus
+  a full-page-image area check distinguishes a scan from an engraving.
+- The SVG export path is present and working even though the SVG *renderer* is
+  deferred — see
+  [ADR 0002](0002-raster-only-svg-renderer-deferred.md).
diff --git a/docs/adr/0006-systems-are-found-by-brackets-not-row-gaps.md b/docs/adr/0006-systems-are-found-by-brackets-not-row-gaps.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..95fbda7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/adr/0006-systems-are-found-by-brackets-not-row-gaps.md
@@ -0,0 +1,67 @@
+# Systems are found by vertical brackets, not by row-darkness gaps
+
+System detection anchors on the **vertical bracket / barline** that spans a
+system's staves, and uses the row-darkness profile only to expand each anchor to
+its ink extent. The obvious approach — find gaps in the row-darkness profile and
+cut in the middle of them — does not work on multi-voice choral scores, which is
+most of the corpus.
+
+## Why the obvious approach fails
+
+A row-darkness profile cannot distinguish an **inter-staff** gap from an
+**inter-system** gap. In a 6-voice closed score, one system is six staves joined
+by a bracket, and the gaps between those six staves look exactly like the gap
+between two systems — only smaller, and not reliably so.
+
+Measured on *Ketun joululaulu*, a 12-page 6-voice arrangement and the hardest
+score in the repertoire:
+
+- On page 2's first system, staff gaps run ~47px against a ~211px system gap. A
+  merge threshold tuned there works.
+- On the same page's second system the lyrics fill the inter-staff gaps, so the
+  ratios invert and the same threshold merges the wrong things.
+
+Result across all 12 pages, row-profile-only versus bracket-anchored:
+
+| | bracket-anchored | row-profile only |
+|---|---|---|
+| systems per page | 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 1 | 10, 6, 7, 7, 7, 8, 8, 5, 4, 5, 8, 4 |
+
+The bracket-anchored counts match the score. The row-profile counts are wrong on
+every page, and wrong by a different amount each time — so no threshold fixes
+them.
+
+## The algorithm
+
+1. **Deskew per page.** Projection-profile variance sweep over ±5°. Measured skew
+   on this song ranges −2.6° to +1.2° *between pages of the same PDF*, so per-page
+   is not optional.
+2. **Find anchors.** Binarise, then morphological open with a tall thin kernel
+   (height ≈ 3% of the page) so only long vertical strokes survive. Take
+   connected components taller than 4% of the page; walk them tallest-first,
+   keeping each one whose y-extent doesn't overlap an already-kept anchor. Each
+   surviving stroke is one system.
+3. **Expand to ink.** Compute the row-darkness profile on a despeckled copy, take
+   its ink runs, and assign each run to the nearest anchor by centre distance. A
+   system's extent is the union of its runs.
+4. **Place cuts** at the midpoint between consecutive systems' ink extents.
+
+Step 3 is what makes this work rather than the bracket alone: a bracket stops at
+the last staff line, but the slice must include the **lyrics below it**. On page
+2, system 1's bracket spans 177–994 while its true ink extent is 179–1071 — the
+77px difference is the bottom voice's lyric line, which the bracket misses
+entirely and the row profile finds.
+
+## Consequences
+
+- Detection needs both signals. Neither the column pass nor the row pass is
+  sufficient alone, so `detect.py` computes both.
+- **Scores without brackets** — single-staff melodies, lead sheets — have no
+  anchors, and fall back to row-profile runs. That fallback is the *only* correct
+  behaviour there, since every ink run genuinely is its own system.
+- Bar numbers printed above a system (this score uses 11, 16, …) sit in their own
+  ink run and get absorbed into the nearest system by step 3. That is right: they
+  belong to the system they label.
+- A page number can be absorbed the same way if its darkness clears the profile
+  threshold, inflating the last system's extent. The content rectangle and the
+  bottom discard slice both prevent this; don't rely on the threshold.
diff --git a/docs/spec.md b/docs/spec.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..62586e2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/spec.md
@@ -0,0 +1,377 @@
+# noteman-slicer — specification
+
+What the tool does and how it behaves. Vocabulary is in
+[`CONTEXT.md`](../CONTEXT.md); the reasoning behind the expensive decisions is in
+[`docs/adr/`](adr/).
+
+## Scope
+
+A local, single-user tool that turns a score PDF into the ordered slice images
+[noteman](../../noteman) consumes, plus the navigation markers that sit on them.
+It automates the mechanical part of noteman's ingestion boundary.
+
+It is **not** a GIMP replacement. Erasing previous-owner pencil marks, chord
+letters and breath marks stays in GIMP — the irreducible manual part, which GIMP
+with a stylus already does well.
+
+**One PDF → one song → one project → one bundle.** Never a many-to-one in any
+direction. A PDF is either bitmap or vector, never mixed.
+
+### Why it's separate from noteman
+
+Splitting it out removed the double-implementation constraint — in-app, every
+operation needs both a fast browser preview and a real server-side render, and
+that constraint is what priced dewarp and brush masking out entirely, not the
+algorithms. It also removed infrastructure noteman doesn't otherwise need (a
+scratch workspace for multi-MB rasters, an edit-list table, cleanup sweeps for
+orphaned temp files, poppler in the Docker image, an admin UI surface), and
+unlocked real image libraries.
+
+It costs nothing: song creation is admin-only, done at home, once per song.
+
+## Operating principle
+
+**Detection proposes, the human disposes.** Every automatic result — skew angle,
+cut positions, source type, staff height, ink bounds — is a suggestion the user
+confirms or modifies before it is committed. There is no unattended mode. See
+[ADR 0004](adr/0004-detection-proposes-the-human-disposes.md).
+
+## Geometry model
+
+**One geometry model, two renderers.** Geometry is stored in **normalised page
+coordinates** (0–1 of page width and height), independent of DPI and of which
+renderer produces the output. Only the final stage differs.
+
+| Concept | Raster | Vector |
+|---|---|---|
+| Cut | y in pixels | y in PDF user space |
+| Discard | drop the slice | drop the slice |
+| Content rectangle | crop before cutting | clip before cutting |
+| Trim | crop to ink bbox | crop `viewBox` to ink bbox |
+| Uniform width | transparent right pad | wider `viewBox`, same content |
+| Staff-height normalise | scale factor | scale factor |
+| Deskew, levels, ink→alpha, 1920 cap | yes | no |
+
+Only the raster renderer ships in release 1 — see
+[ADR 0002](adr/0002-raster-only-svg-renderer-deferred.md). The editor is one
+editor regardless, since a vector PDF has to be rasterized just to display it on
+screen.
+
+### Pipeline order
+
+```
+load raster → deskew → levels → content rect → cut → discard
+            → trim → scale → pad → ink→alpha → encode
+```
+
+**Load raster** differs by source type. A scanned PDF carries one full-page image
+per page, and that image *is* the scan — extract it at its native resolution
+(`extract_image`) rather than re-rendering the page. Re-rendering at a fixed
+600 DPI resamples a 200 DPI scan up by 3×, which triples the pixel count and adds
+no detail. A vector PDF has no embedded raster, so it is rendered — see the DPI
+note in *Reference values*.
+
+The rest of the order is not arbitrary:
+
+- **Levels before anything geometric**, so the trim bounding box is computed on
+  the image that actually ships.
+- **Content rect before cutting**, so margin junk never enters a slice.
+- **Trim before scale**, since the scale factor derives from the widest *trimmed*
+  slice.
+
+### Slices, cuts and discard
+
+A page starts as a single slice; each cut splits one slice into two. Slices
+therefore tile the page with no gaps and no overlap.
+
+Headers, footers and blank regions leave the song via a **discard** flag, not via
+cuts at the page edges. Modelling a slice as "the region between two cuts" leaks:
+page 2 has no header, so it would need an invented top cut whose position depends
+on whether that page happens to have one.
+
+Cut placement is forgiving — anywhere inside the whitespace gap yields the same
+output, because trim crops to ink afterwards.
+
+### Content rectangle
+
+The region of a page that holds music, set per PDF and adjustable per page,
+applied before cutting. Everything outside it is dropped.
+
+This handles margin junk structurally rather than case-by-case, because margin
+junk is by definition outside the music: scan-edge bands, spine shadows, and page
+numbers printed in the side margin level with a system. That last one matters
+more than it looks — see the trim consequences below.
+
+### Trim, scale, pad
+
+**Trim** tight on all four sides, per slice. This normalises away the left-margin
+drift between scanned pages, and flattens the engraved indent of the first
+system — correct here, since noteman strips the printed header the indent made
+room for.
+
+Two consequences:
+
+- A stray speck at the far left anchors the trim, shifting that slice relative to
+  its neighbours. Mitigate by ignoring connected components under a few hundred
+  pixels (`cv2.connectedComponentsWithStats`) when computing the bounding box.
+- A page number in the side margin level with a system would set that slice's
+  bounding box, which sets the song's widest slice, which scales the whole song
+  down. One artefact, whole song smaller. Hence the content rectangle.
+
+**Scale is normalised on staff height, not width.** Width-based scaling assumes
+every slice comes from the same scan at the same DPI. It breaks for a rescanned
+page, a PDF mixing scan generations, or a re-engraved replacement system — whose
+width depends on how much music is in it, not on matching its neighbours. Staff
+height is the invariant a reader perceives as "the notes are the same size", and
+it falls out of the same row-darkness profile detection already computes.
+
+Two steps, both per song: normalise every slice to a common staff height, then
+scale the song uniformly so its widest slice lands at **1920px**. That is a
+ceiling, never a target — **never upscale**. A song that comes out narrower stays
+narrower; enlarging a 600 DPI scan past its real resolution buys softness and
+bytes and no detail.
+
+**Pad** narrower slices with transparency on the right, so every slice in a song
+is the same width, flush left, notes the same size. A short system simply ends
+earlier.
+
+### Encoding
+
+**Lossless WebP, with levels applied and alpha quantised to 16 levels.** Roughly
+7 KB per slice, about 450 KB for a 65-system song. Lossy encodings and the
+alternative formats are all *larger* for this content — measured, with the
+figures, in
+[ADR 0003](adr/0003-lossless-webp-with-levels-and-alpha-quantisation.md).
+
+Ink handling is luminance → alpha: ink forced to pure black,
+`alpha = 255 − luminance`. Not `pixel == white` thresholding — staff lines are
+antialiased, and binary removal leaves jagged edges.
+
+## Detection
+
+All of it is a suggestion, all of it overridable.
+
+**Deskew** — per page, and not optionally so: measured skew varies from −2.6° to
++1.2° *between pages of the same PDF*. Staff lines are by far the strongest
+horizontal signal in sheet music, so a projection-profile variance sweep over ±5°
+finds the angle reliably — sum row-darkness for each candidate angle, take the
+angle of maximum variance. Run on a downscaled copy. Pair with a manual slider.
+
+**Systems** — anchored on the **vertical bracket** that spans a system's staves,
+not on gaps in the row-darkness profile. A row profile cannot distinguish an
+inter-staff gap from an inter-system gap on multi-voice choral scores, and gets
+the system count wrong on every page. See
+[ADR 0006](adr/0006-systems-are-found-by-brackets-not-row-gaps.md) for the
+measurement and the full algorithm. In outline:
+
+1. Binarise; morphological open with a tall thin kernel so only long vertical
+   strokes survive; keep non-overlapping components taller than 4% of the page.
+   Each is one system.
+2. Take ink runs from the row-darkness profile and assign each to the nearest
+   anchor. A system's extent is the union of its runs — this is what pulls in the
+   lyrics printed *below* the last staff, which the bracket stops short of.
+3. Propose cuts at the midpoint between consecutive systems' ink extents, and
+   pre-set the discard flag on a page's top and bottom slice when they contain no
+   system.
+
+Scores with no bracket — single-staff melodies, lead sheets — have no anchors and
+fall back to row-profile runs, which is correct there.
+
+**Staff height** — peak-to-peak spacing in the row profile.
+
+**Source type** — `get_images(full=True)` / `get_drawings()` proposes bitmap or
+vector per PDF; the tool asks the user to confirm before routing. (`full=True` is
+required, or `get_image_bbox` rejects the item.)
+
+**Despeckle feeds detection only.** A median blur plus dropping tiny connected
+components denoises the *profile the detector reads*; the shipped pixels come
+from the levels-adjusted image. The known failure mode is specks, so the fix
+belongs on the signal, not the output.
+
+## Levels
+
+Two sliders per song (black point, white point) applied via `cv2.LUT`, with a
+per-page override.
+
+In release 1, not deferred: with `alpha = 255 − luminance`, a scan's greyness
+*becomes* transparency, so a faint or yellowed source produces washed-out notes
+on a hazy background and **nothing downstream can rescue it**. Set the white
+point just under the paper's luminance and the paper vanishes completely; set the
+black point at the ink's darkest and notes go solid. It is also the single
+biggest lever on output size.
+
+Adaptive methods (CLAHE, adaptive thresholding) are the trap — tuned for text,
+they eat the thin stuff on notation: hairpin tips, slur ends, ledger lines,
+tapered beams. A global LUT whose effect you can see beats a local algorithm you
+can't predict.
+
+## Editor
+
+**PySide6.** `QGraphicsView` provides the viewport — pan, zoom, screen↔image
+coordinate mapping, resampling, hit-testing — which would otherwise be ~150 lines
+of hand-rolled geometry. `cv2.imshow` was rejected: OpenCV's highgui is GTK/X11
+and lands on XWayland at best, and it has no text input at all.
+
+What the editor does: pan and zoom the page, drag cut lines, toggle discard,
+adjust the content rectangle, move the levels sliders, place markers, fill in
+song metadata, export.
+
+Marker placement needs a **slice picker** — a `QListView` in icon mode over the
+slice previews — since every jump source stores an explicit target. One widget
+serving all six jump types.
+
+## Project file
+
+Autosaved JSON beside the source PDF, holding the source path and hash, cuts,
+discards, content rectangle, skew angles, levels, staff-height overrides, markers
+and metadata. The bundle is *generated* from it, so export is a pure function of
+the project file plus the PDF.
+
+It buys crash safety, resume across sessions (authoring is trickle-in), and
+**re-export** — change the 1920 cap, fix one cut, or add the SVG renderer later,
+and every song's bundle regenerates without repeating any human work.
+
+The project file references the PDF and never contains it; the hash lets the
+editor warn if the PDF changed underneath.
+
+## Markers
+
+Placed here rather than in noteman: at cut time you are already reading the score
+page by page at full resolution, so the Segno, the Coda sign, the "to coda" text
+and the rehearsal letters are on screen. Deferring means reading the whole score a
+second time to find the same symbols.
+
+noteman's vocabulary, carried verbatim — `rehearsal_letter`, `section_label`,
+`segno`, `coda`, `fine`, `repeat_start`, `repeat_end`, `volta`, `to_coda`,
+`ds_al_coda`, `ds_al_fine`, `dc_al_coda`, `dc_al_fine`, `generic_jump`. A small
+stable enum, but real coupling: adding a type means changing both repos.
+
+Three shapes among them:
+
+- **Bare tags:** `segno`, `coda`, `fine`, `repeat_start`, `repeat_end`.
+- **Tags with free text:** `rehearsal_letter` ("C"), `section_label` ("CHORUS"),
+  `volta` ("1.").
+- **Jump sources:** `to_coda`, `ds_al_coda`, `ds_al_fine`, `dc_al_coda`,
+  `dc_al_fine`, `generic_jump`.
+
+**Every jump source stores its target slice explicitly.** noteman's viewer
+currently resolves by type — a `to_coda` finds the song's unique `coda` at tap
+time — but that puts an unwritten "exactly one Coda per song" invariant into a
+contract between two separately-maintained repos, enforced by neither. Authoring
+the target costs one click on a slice already on screen, and in exchange the
+bundle is self-describing and a score with two codas simply works.
+
+## Bundle
+
+The only channel to noteman. No API, no direct upload — see
+[ADR 0001](adr/0001-slicer-owns-image-processing-bundle-is-the-only-channel.md).
+
+```
+song.zip
+  song.json
+  original.pdf
+  001.webp 002.webp …
+```
+
+```json
+{
+  "v": 1,
+  "title": "…", "composer": "…", "arranger": "…",
+  "slices": [
+    { "file": "001.webp" },
+    { "file": "002.webp", "markers": [{ "type": "rehearsal_letter", "label": "A" }] },
+    { "file": "003.webp", "markers": [{ "type": "to_coda", "destination": 7 }] }
+  ]
+}
+```
+
+Array order **is** slice order — one ordering, not two. Markers nest inside the
+slice they sit on, so indices appear in exactly one place: a jump source's
+`destination`.
+
+`"v": 1` is eight bytes of insurance. The bundle is the only channel, MIDI and
+MP3s are planned for a later phase, and bundles are archived artifacts that may be
+re-imported a year later.
+
+Otherwise: plain zip, no manifest beyond this, no checksums, hand-fixable.
+Python's `zipfile` is stdlib; the import side needs one zero-dep library
+(`fflate`), since Bun has zlib but no zip reader.
+
+**Contents:** slices, markers, the original PDF, and song-level text metadata
+(title, subtitle, composer, original artist, arranger, lyricist, translator,
+voice list). Metadata is included not because the slicer transforms it but
+because you have to read the title block anyway to mark the header slice
+discarded — typing eight fields while it's on screen beats reopening the PDF
+later.
+
+Rehearsal MIDI and MP3s are deliberately out of the first bundle.
+
+### One rule for the import side
+
+**Import creates a new song only; never re-import onto an existing one.** Jump
+destinations reference slices by ID, so replacing a song's slices silently
+orphans every marker on it. Re-cutting happens *before* marker authoring in
+practice, so forbidding it costs nothing and prevents a genuinely nasty data-loss
+mode. Re-export from the project file is the supported path.
+
+## Implementation
+
+**Python**, chosen for OpenCV access and iteration speed. Installed as a package
+via `uv tool install --editable .`, which puts a `noteman-slicer` command on PATH
+that runs from any directory with no venv to activate. The one cwd trap: load
+bundled data via `Path(__file__).parent` or `importlib.resources`, never a
+relative path.
+
+Dependencies: **PyMuPDF**, **PySide6**, **opencv-python-headless**, **numpy** —
+all wheels, no system packages. PyMuPDF covers every PDF need; see
+[ADR 0005](adr/0005-pymupdf-for-all-pdf-access.md).
+
+Verified: `cv2` 5.0.0 writes 4-channel lossless WebP with alpha preserved
+byte-exact (`IMWRITE_WEBP_QUALITY, 101`).
+
+Module boundaries: `pdf.py` (load, source-type detect, rasterize), `detect.py`
+(deskew, row-darkness profile, system runs, staff height), `bundle.py`,
+`editor.py`.
+
+## Changes required in noteman
+
+On noteman's timeline, not the slicer's — but release 1 produces artifacts
+nothing consumes until this lands.
+
+1. **Delete the sharp normalisation pipeline.** The slicer's output is final.
+2. **Bundle import** — unzip → read `song.json` → create song → insert slices in
+   array order → insert markers, mapping index → new slice UUID → store the PDF.
+3. **Jump sources carry explicit destinations** — `destinationSliceId` is already
+   nullable on every marker type, so this is viewer logic, not schema.
+
+SVG support on the noteman side (`image/svg+xml` in the upload path, `.svg` in
+`CONTENT_TYPES`, and a CSP header on SVG responses) is not needed until the SVG
+renderer ships.
+
+## Phasing
+
+**Release 1 — editor + detection + bundle export, raster only.** Vector PDFs are
+rasterized like everything else; they're the clean case, where deskew is a no-op
+and detection works best. Levels, content rectangle, discard, markers, project
+file.
+
+Everything else is deferred and tracked as issues on the Gitea repo.
+
+## Reference values
+
+- Final slice width cap: **1920px**, matching the viewer sheet's max-width. A
+  ceiling, not a target.
+- Output format: **lossless WebP**.
+- Working resolution:
+  - **Scanned sources — the embedded image's native resolution.** Never
+    re-render. Real scans in this corpus run ~200 DPI (1653×2332 for A4), which
+    is *below* the 1920 cap, so those songs ship narrower than 1920 and are never
+    upscaled.
+  - **Vector sources — 600 DPI**, configurable. A4 @ 600 DPI is ~4960×7016 px;
+    the ~2.6× downsample to 1920 is itself a quality win via antialiasing. 300
+    DPI would suffice for the target, but 600 buys headroom for deskew
+    resampling.
+- A slice = **one system** = one full line of music across all voices, typically
+  4–12 bars, lyrics intact.
+- Upload/bundle sizes are not constrained by noteman's old 25 MB/file limits —
+  the bundle bypasses that path entirely.